82 Blinky Palermo

Blinky Palermo. “Modell” Wall Drawing with Music, 1969. Galerie René Block, Berlin. With Henning Christiansen, Modell op. 33. All photographs provided by Thordis Moeller, Palermo Archives, Millerton, NY; © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 82 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381043320750 by guest on 28 September 2021 Decoration and Abstraction in Blinky Palermo’s Wall Paintings CHRISTINE MEHRING The forms and concepts of decoration are not solely the domain of architectural history, the history of decorative arts, or the emerging field of visual culture. They have a place in art history as well. Decoration can be central to artistic practice, to the ways in which art communicates generally and relates to society specifically. While familiar to historians of pre-modern and non-Western art, this terrain is much less explored by historians of twentieth-century art, despite the number of artists who embraced decorative practices during that time. Counter to common expectations, this includes abstract artists of the postwar era. In pursuit of these issues, the nearly thirty wall drawings and paintings that the German abstract painter Blinky Palermo made between December 1968 and March 1973 prove enlightening. When Palermo drew lines on walls or painted them in monochrome fields of color, when he highlighted spatial characteristics or added decorative forms, some critics dismissed him as a mere wall painter while others praised him for providing an “intensive experience of space.”1 The two accounts, representative of the reception of these works, will turn out to be important for understanding the ways in which the wall paintings exemplify decoration mobilized to generate an abstract art that is historically meaningful—both with respect to the history of abstract painting and in relation to the historical context of a German sixties marked by the so-called economic miracle and by vibrant debates about the social and political role of art. Palermo left us with three other types of work: cloth pictures (bands of commercial fabric mounted on stretchers), metal pictures (perhaps best known in the United States following the 1989 exhibition of To the People of New York City at the Dia Foundation for the Arts and its recent installation at Dia’s new space in Beacon, New York), and what Palermo referred to as “objects” (painted pieces of wood in var- ious shapes, often mounted on the wall in pairs). While Palermo’s other work may look strikingly different from the wall paintings and is far less concerned with ornament and decoration, it shares a historical resonance with the abstract forms and colors that will be at issue here—for example, the objects engage the legacies of a Grey Room 18, Winter 2004, pp. 82–107. © 2005 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 83 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381043320750 by guest on 28 September 2021 national tradition in German art. To relate Palermo’s works, particularly his wall paintings, to their historical context is at odds with the prevalent, often crude reception of his art, like much of postwar German art, as existentialist and expressionist. Palermo’s art has long been seen in relation to a litany of biographical trauma: his adoption as an infant soon after the end of World War II; his use of a pseudonym taken from the name of the Mafia manager of the boxer Sonny Liston, Frank “Blinky” Palermo; his reluctance to speak or write about his work; and, above all, his problems with drugs and alcohol that led to a tragic death in 1977 at the young age of thirty-three. Within the Wall Paintings Experience, for Palermo, was of central importance to his temporary wall paintings. “It does not stay in the photograph,” he warned, “it stays only in the memory of someone who actually stood inside.”2 Lamenting this transient mode of working, the artist nevertheless assembled thorough documentation, including notes, photographs, sketches, and ground plans mounted on cardboard, which today pro- vide the basis, along with contemporary reviews and a handful of reconstructions, for any historical consideration of his body of work.3 Palermo made one of his earliest wall drawings in the spring of 1969, for the exhibition series Blockade at the Galerie Block in Berlin. He responded to the gallery’s idiosyncratic sequence of walls joined at varying angles, unfolding like an accordion around the circumfer- ence of the room. Wherever walls met, Palermo drew two thin lines with red chalk extending from floor to ceiling on either side of the joint. As photographs and a film made by local television show, this alteration enhanced the awkward, strange qualities of the space.4 The lines mimicked the vertical edges of the walls but, although drawn thinly and lightly, were more readily visible than the actual joints. In Bottom: Blinky Palermo. effect, each joint flattened out and disappeared, rendering uncertain “Modell” Wall Drawing with the exact demarcations of the space. As the rhythm of lines com- Music, 1969. Galerie René Block, Berlin. With Henning pelled one to walk along the walls—the artist suitably referred to the Christiansen, Modell op. 33. piece as an Abwicklung, “unfolding”5—this illusion kept repeating. Opposite: Blinky Palermo. Palermo reportedly talked about another version of this work made Cloth Bracing, 1969. for the Kabinett für Aktuelle Kunst in Bremerhaven in terms of Galerie Ernst, Hannover. “Aktivierung des Raums,” “activation of space.”6 The vertical lines in both loca- tions created a heightened, activated sense of space insofar as the resulting optical illusions defamiliarized the space for viewers and enhanced their spatial, perceptual, and bodily consciousness. Sensitivity to and reflection about the 84 Grey Room 18 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381043320750 by guest on 28 September 2021 surroundings replaced everyday spatial oblivion. Visitors to the Berlin and Bremerhaven exhibitions were further puzzled by the accompanying music. In a letter to his Berlin dealer René Block, Palermo referred to “a tape that continuously plays the piano piece with text Modell op. 33 by Henning Christiansen. This piece,” he explains, “is made concrete through my intervention, as it comes from an imaginary space into your concrete space and hence enforces my intentions.”7 The piece by the contemporary Danish composer and visual artist features a voice saying in a simple rhythm, “hier von und dazu,” accompanied by minimal piano chords. Most of these words have multiple meanings: hier means “here”; von means “from,” “of,” “by,” or “about”; and dazu can be roughly translated as “for the purpose,” “therefore,” “for this,” “besides,” “in addition,” “together,” or “with.”8 How did Palermo make this music “concrete”? The composer himself had already “concretized” language, as it were, stressing its material qualities in a way similar to concrete poetry by isolating prepositions from nouns that would determine their meaning. The longer one listens, the more these words turn into mere babble, pure sounds arranged in melodic rhythm. Palermo’s wall drawing enforced the uncertainty of the words and suggested several referents: hier may be the “here” of the speaker or the viewer, von is a “from” that is spatially and temporally undetermined, and dazu leaves open what is added to what—viewer to space, space to viewer, lines to space, line to line, or viewer to line. Such multiple meanings foregrounded the materiality of the words and thus made the composition “concrete.” Wall drawing and music worked in tandem to defamiliarize exhibition visitors. That effect became decisively more visual several months later in Tuchverspannung, poorly translated as “cloth bracing,” one of two adjacent room installations at the Galerie Ernst in Hannover. Palermo had stretched a band of yellow-orange cotton cloth diagonally from wall to floor in one corner of the room and from wall to ceiling in the opposite corner, concealing the right angles where walls met floor and ceiling. A visitor to the exhibition described losing his balance while walking through the space, comparing the experience to a slowly tilting ship deck. Another wrote that “the room lost its customary proportions and looked as if it were about to keel over. In this way the viewer’s normal sense of space is dramatically disturbed and the viewer himself is left with a feeling of insecurity.”9 Even the photograph compels us to tilt our head to the left to adjust for a disturbed sense of balance. The usual horizontal anchor of body and vision is replaced by the diagonal axis spanning the space Mehring | Decoration and Abstraction in Blinky Palermo’s Wall Paintings 85 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381043320750 by guest on 28 September 2021 between the two bands—an axis Palermo marked with an arrow in one of his sketches. Whether to balance or to enrich viewers’ spatial experiences in this exhibition, Palermo created a contrasting sense of stability in the adjacent gallery space, described by a reviewer as a straightforward articulation of the room’s boundaries: A dark blue line “exactly follows, at a slight distance, the contours of the door, windows, and heater.”10 The wall circumscription and the monochrome plane featured in this early exhibition became central motifs in Palermo’s wall paintings and were soon used to unsettling ends in more sophisticated ways. In a second wall painting for the Kabinett für Aktuelle Kunst, a “mild grey,” as one reviewer described it, covered the lower two- thirds of the three walls (the fourth wall being the fully glassed store- front) and reached a little above the average height of a person.11 Merging with the similarly colored floor, the grey fields enclosed visitors; from all sides of the perceptual field the walls pushed them back toward the window in a close-to-claustrophobic manner.

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